Editing Don Charles Wijewardena (section)

== Ideas ==

''The Revolt in the Temple'' is organized as a modernized retelling of the classical Buddhist narrative of the sāsana's decline and restoration: a golden age in which Sinhalese kings ruled as Buddhist dharma-rājas is followed by colonial catastrophe, understood as the near-extinguishing of Buddhism by British rule and Christian missions, and the book closes by demanding the sāsana's restoration under a modern democratic state.<ref>Bretfeld (2025), "D. C. Wijewardena", pp. 71–73.</ref> This nationalist frame, and its argument for Buddhism's constitutional "foremost place," is the aspect of the book for which Wijewardena is best remembered, and it is not in itself a radical position; Tambiah, one of the few scholars to assess Wijewardena directly, characterizes him as a political conservative whose book's "insistent denunciation of Marxism and the left" reflects his class background rather than any socialist commitment.<ref>Tambiah (1992), ''Buddhism Betrayed?'', p. 38.</ref>

Read closely, however, the book's economic argument is considerably more ambivalent, and its final third (Part III, "Man and the State," together with the closing chapter "Towards a Better World," which Wijewardena opens with Marx's eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach — "the philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world in various ways; the thing is, however, to change it") sets out a genuine, if idiosyncratic, attempt to fuse Buddhism with left economic theory.<ref>Wijewardena (Vijayavardhana) (1953), ''Dharma-Vijaya'', p. 600.</ref> Discussing the Soviet Union at length, Wijewardena distinguishes sharply between Communism as a spiritual ideal and Marxism as a materialist philosophy of history, arguing that "Buddhism and Communism in their essence and nature are spiritual" where Marxism is not, and that the Buddha himself had preached a form of Communism "2400 years before Karl Marx was born" through the Vinaya rule that alms given to the monastic community (saṅgha) be shared according to need.<ref>Wijewardena (Vijayavardhana) (1953), ''Dharma-Vijaya'', pp. 211–212.</ref> On this reading the saṅgha's traditional communal ownership of property is itself a working, voluntary "Buddhist Communism," offered as a model superior to the coercive, atheistic Communism of the Soviet state.<ref>Wijewardena (Vijayavardhana) (1953), ''Dharma-Vijaya'', pp. 211–213, 625–626.</ref> He rejects Leninist revolution chiefly for its violence rather than its economics, writing that "a large number of us are admirers of Russia, and, so far as we can see, we in Ceylon have a lot to learn from her," while insisting that Ceylon should not have to pay Russia's price in suffering; the Soviet experiment, he concludes, will eventually give way to "Democratic Socialism," a "final solution" located between Communism and capitalism.<ref>Wijewardena (Vijayavardhana) (1953), ''Dharma-Vijaya'', pp. 433–434.</ref>

The chapter "Towards a Better World" develops this evolutionary socialism into a concrete economic program for Ceylon. Wijewardena endorses Marx's argument, drawn from an unpublished essay he cites via the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, that land nationalization is the precondition for ending capitalist exploitation, and he condemns private landownership in terms borrowed from Rousseau and Proudhon, arguing that "Communism as public control of private property has always existed and must be present in every culture."<ref>Wijewardena (Vijayavardhana) (1953), ''Dharma-Vijaya'', pp. 619–622.</ref> He proposes a gradual, constitutional transition — compensated nationalization of banking, transport, insurance, and heavy industry under the right of eminent domain, cooperative rather than collective farming suited to Ceylon's smallholding peasantry, profit-sharing co-partnership in industry, and a permanent National Planning Board to coordinate production according to need — explicitly presenting this cooperative economy as an extension into secular society of "the Buddha's idea of community in ownership and sharing which is the basis on which His Order of the Sangha is established."<ref>Wijewardena (Vijayavardhana) (1953), ''Dharma-Vijaya'', pp. 625–630.</ref>

Wijewardena's radicalism is not confined to economics. He turns the same reformist logic on the saṅgha itself, arguing in the book's titular chapter that the monastic order "has lost its grip" and is "daily deteriorating materially and spiritually," and calling for its wholesale reorganization: monks should be trained in social service alongside doctrine, secluded pursuit of individual Nirvana should give way to "a life of self-forgetful activity," and Buddhism should shed dogma and ritual to become what he calls a "Social Religion" open to anyone living a moral life regardless of temple affiliation.<ref>Wijewardena (Vijayavardhana) (1953), ''Dharma-Vijaya'', pp. 586–588.</ref> He casts the Buddha himself as history's paradigmatic "rebel" against reactionary convention, and frames feudalism's historical replacement by capitalism, and capitalism's coming replacement by socialism, as instances of the same Buddhist law of impermanence (anicca) that licenses — indeed demands — the saṅgha's transformation.<ref>Wijewardena (Vijayavardhana) (1953), ''Dharma-Vijaya'', pp. 587–588.</ref>

The overall picture is thus of a lay Buddhist nationalist who is simultaneously majoritarian in his politics of religion and genuinely engaged, on his own idiosyncratic terms, with the vocabulary of socialism and institutional saṅgha reform: he rejects revolutionary Marxism's materialism and violence while annexing its critique of capitalism, its vision of common ownership, and even its rhetoric of praxis to a specifically Buddhist and nationalist project. This tension between a conservative communal politics and a redistributive, reformist economics is precisely what later scholarship identifies as characteristic of the wider mid-century Sinhala Buddhist revivalist milieu from which Wijewardena's book emerged.